Playing with your food

Blog move

2008-05-04T05:36:00.001-07:00

This blog has now moved. It can be found in the food category of my new site

More penne and cheese

2008-02-09T12:24:00.000-08:00

My penne and cheese experimentation the other day inspired me to try more on the baked pasta theme. It's quite different, and significantly more elaborate and... well, in fact bears no resemblance to the other recipe except that it contains penne and cheese (though a different type) and is baked in a glass dish.

What I used

About 300g of dried penne
One medium-large onion
One small aubergine
One yellow bell pepper
One red bell pepper
Three large (somewhat underripe) tomatoes
Ludicrous quantities of grated cheese (enough to cover the roasting dish)
One dried chilli pepper
About 1/2 tbsp coarse salt
Olive oil

The cheeses I used were turkish cheeses which the packages respectively claim them to be Eski Kasar and Kasar Peyniri. Kasar is apparently a kind of sheep milk cheese. They're both semi-hard cheeses, with Eski Kasar tasting approximately like a milder parmesan and Kasar Peyniri approximating mozzarella. You could probably use those as substitutions.

What I did

There are quite a few steps in this, and it ended up taking a long time - about an hour and a half (though not requiring continuous attention).

I finely chopped the onion and peppers and cubed the aubergine. I roast this with olive oil, salt and the chilli pepper (which I flaked) at about 250C until it was fairly cooked.

Meanwhile I cooked the penne (deliberately undercooking it a fair bit). I coarsely chopped the tomatoes, and once the roast vegetables were cooked I added the pasta and tomatoes, mixed it up thoroughly and put it back in the oven at 200C.

After about 10 minutes I realised that the pasta wasn't really cooking well enough, so I covered it in foil to keep the moisture in (you'd be surprised at how hard this is to do to a ridiculously hot glass baking tray...) and put it back in for another 15-20 minutes.

Once the tomatoes were looking suitably roast and the pasta was cooked I covered the top in grated cheese and put it back in to the oven until it was cooked (the desired end result was the top looking like a nicely cooked pizza topping). At that point, it was ready to serve.

Result

This made a huge amount of food, and it's really filling. I think I'm going to get at least another 3 meals out of this, quite possibly 4. Fortunately, it's very nice. Mmm...

I'd do a few things differently - I'd use a little more chilli. The vegetables were only very mildly spicy (I think my dried chilli peppers are getting old and losing flavour). I'd like to use a bit less olive oil, but my experience is that those vegetables don't roast as nicely without. I'd probably use a bit less cheese.

In terms of timing, I think I should have put the tomatoes in before the pasta (but after the other vegetables) and let them roast a little bit, and similarly let the pasta cook a little more so that it was slightly hard but edible at the point it went in.

Still, definitely something to make again.

Food hacks

2008-02-07T14:35:00.000-08:00

I don't make much mention of it on here (see my other blog for somewhere that I do), but in my day job I'm a programmer. Counted amongst the weird and wonderful jargon that profession entails is the word hack.

There's a particular sort of hack I'm particularly good at. Quick, and usually somewhat dirty, solutions that use what's available in unexpected ways. Reactions to them can be anything from "Ooh, that's neat" to "AIEEE! MY EYES!", but they usually get the job done a lot faster than the alternatives. I don't use them all the time, but I probably use them a bit more often than I should.

This post is basically an example of me transplanting that technique to my cooking. The results are... unusual.

Without further ado, some recipes.

Recipe 1: Macaroni and Cheese

I just got back from a trip to New York (well, technically Jersey City), to visit my girlfriend, Victoria. We both cooked while I was there, and one of the things she cooked was her macaroni and cheese recipe. It's essentially the macaroni and cheese analogue of my brownies - do the simplest thing that can possibly work and the results are delicious.

Ingredients

Macaroni

Milk

Cheese (Victoria uses a Longhorn-style cheddar. "Lord knows what you call it on that side of the ocean" -- Victoria. I used a mature english cheddar)

Something to serve it with. Victoria uses stewed whole tomatoes, I just used a hot sauce.

I don't really know the proportions for this - I think it's basically "make enough macaroni to serve the requisite number of people then add milk and cheese until it looks right". Cooking is equally straightforward - cook the macaroni until it's slightly underdone, cube the cheese, put the cheese, milk and cooked macaroni in a greased glass dish and bake until it looks cooked (at around 200C I think).

So, yesterday evening I thought "Hmm. What to make for dinner? Oh, why don't I give Victoria's macaroni and cheese recipe a go?"

I went to sainsburys to buy the ingredients only to discover, admittedly somewhat unsurprisingly, that they did not have any macaroni. This made me sad:

Oh well, macaroni is just pasta, right?

Hack 1: Penne and Cheese

Exactly the same as the macaroni and cheese, but with penne instead.

Result: Surprisingly nice. The macaroni is a bit better, but the penne is entirely acceptable here. It just has a slightly weird shape for it.

Anyway, I have a really evil recipe that I felt like making tonight:

Coney Island Fries

There seem to be approximately a million different distinct recipes each claiming to be coney island fries. Most of them involve some sort of meat. I call these coney island fries because the pub whose recipe I reverse engineered them from did. They're evil because they're really tasty but contain no redeeming nutritional or culinary value. I try to avoid making them too often, but occasionally I succumb.

Ingredients

Oven fries

Cheddar cheese

Guacamole

Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce

Recipe: Cook the oven fries as per normal. When they're nearly done, add large quantities of grated cheddar. Serve with guacamole and way more sweet chilli sauce than can possibly be good for you.

Result: Mmmm.

So, having decided to make it I went to sainsburys for ingredients. Result: No oven fries.

At this point I was feeling like it was sainsburys's mission to thwart me.

So, I wondered what I could substitute for the fries in order to get something resembling success.

At this point you would be right to have a sinking feeling...

"Ah ha", I thought, "I have leftover penne and cheese at home, don't I?"

The rest, as they say, is history.

Hack 2: Coney Island Penne

I hurried home to put my diabolical plan into action.

Ingredients

Leftover penne and cheese

A handful of frozen corn

Guacamole

Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce

Recipe: Heat up penne and cheese. Add frozen corn because I'm feeling guilty. Serve with guacamole and sweet chilli sauce.

Results: Well, hmm. Not exactly good per se. Interesting, certainly edible, and not nearly as bad as one might fear, but kinda inferior to its constituent recipes - I wouldn't say no to eating this again, but I'd take the penne and cheese or the coney island fries over it any day.

Oh well. I did say it was a hack.

Testing, testing. Is this thing on? (Also, Cheesebread)

2007-09-01T19:13:00.000-07:00

Good lord. There's a blog here. I wonder how that happened? Whose is it? Mine, you say? Wow...

In keeping with my new enterprisey status, I'd like to begin this post with a little Q&A session.

Q: Why has David not been posting humorous cooking anecdotes?
A: Because he's lame.

Q: What was David doing at 2:30AM?
A: Making cheesebread.

Q: Why on earth was David making cheesebread at such a silly hour?
A: His body has this really funny trick it plays on him. When he's tired he thinks "Hm. I'm tired. I think I'll go to bed early". He does so and most unusually falls right to sleep. He then wakes up a mere three hours later still tired but totally unable to get back to sleep. On this particular occasion, after two hours of trying to sleep he decided to make use of the wonderful distraction that is the internet and upon repeated application of StumbleUpon found his way to an interesting looking recipe. Given that he'd recently been complaining about not doing any proper cooking, had all the ingredients to hand and suddenly possessed a great deal of spare time, a better question would be:

Q: Did David have anything better to do at 2:30AM than make cheesebread?
A: No.

David will now cease this bizarre affectation of referring to himself in the third person.

The recipe I used is pretty much taken from that post verbatim. I may be slapdash with other recipes, but you don't fuck with bread or the bread mafia will come round to your house and break your kneecaps (also, worse, you'll get lousy bread). I ended up adding about half a cup more flour, as the dough was looking very gloopy (I'm not sure why).

So, after a careful perusal of the recipe (for those just joining us, that means "I vaguely eyeballed the ingredients and ensured that I had all of them") I set to work. I got all the ingredients out and put the oven on to preheat.

The astute reader will note that you do not need to put the oven on to preheat at the start of making bread, as it has to rise for over an hour.

The not so astute David took about 10 minutes to realise this before looking sheepish and turning the oven off.

Anyway, other than the mentioned gloopiness I followed the recipe fairly exactly. No comments there. I will add that when doing a quick eyeball of the ingredients you should also do a quick eyeball of the cooking implements, as I realised too late that this was a two tin recipe and I only had one bread tin. I ended up using the excess to make a small round loaf on the base of one of my other baking trays.

I also ended up being impatient and putting the small round loaf in after only half an hour of rising. I shall be prepared when the bread mafia come for me.

This stuff smells amazing while baking. Rather unsurprisingly, a combination of the smell of freshly baking bread and grilled cheese. Equally unsurprising, the impatient version of the loaf was too flat. Still tasted pretty good though, as the rapid vanishing of over half of it demonstrated.

The second one rose a lot more, so I'm expecting it to be a lot better, but I'll wait 'till the morning to actually open it and find out. I'll add an update then. For now, I'm going to go make another attempt at that sleep thing.

Update:

A little disappointing. The loaf seems to have collapsed overnight. It's still a lot less dense than the trial version, but doesn't have the really appealing consistency of the version I linked to. I think I should have let it rise for longer than I did (it was about an hour, but it might have been on the short side of 'about'. Quite possibly I should have mixed it more vigorously than I did). Also, I think I should have used a sharper cheddar. Still, tastes great, and is light enough. I'm going to enjoy it. :-)

It's Groun... err. Pancake Day!

2007-02-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

Well, as you probably know today is pancake day. I thought I'd celebrate it with a nice festive nut roast, but unfortunately I didn't have the ingredients so I decided to go with a less conventional choice: Pancakes.

The problem with growing up, I find, is that you've figured out your parents secrets. Well, some of them anyway. When I was younger my parents often cooked breakfast on weekends. Most of them my mother made, but my father cooked occasionally. In particular he specialised in cooking crepes. We called them english pancakes (to distinguish them from American pancakes). We always considered these a great treat, as we didn't get them very often.

The secret? They're actually really easy to make. The batter takes 5 minutes with a food processor. I mean, sure, his are probably a bit better than mine. But the basic principle is almost no effort at all (well, ask me again once I've washed everything up).

What I used

1 cup white flower
1 tsp salt
4 eggs
1.5 cups milk
A very small amount of vegetable oil (for frying)

What I did

It's completely possible to do this without a food processor. That being said, I have a food processor and am lazy. Place bets on my not using it?

So, what did I do? First, I shoved everything in the food processor and hit blend until it was smooth. There, mix is done.

Now, I know you, and I know you looked at that ingredients list and thought "Bloody hell David, that's a lot of pancakes". Well, maybe you're less inclined to casual blasphemy than I am and thought "Gosh durn Davey boy, that there be a lot of pancakes". Same principle though. Well, you're right. So the next thing I did was immediately transfer half the mix to a plastic container and stick it in the fridge. Pancakes for breakfast it is.

Cooking the pancakes was straightforward. I heated up a nonstick frying pan. It's important to heat it up first. If you put the pancake on a cold pan it will die of hypothermia. Or possibly just stick really badly. Oh well, the first one stuck really badly anyway. Probably partly because I didn't let it heat up enough, but I remembered that my dad usually put a tiny bit of vegetable oil in the first one to stop this from happening, so I added a bit after I removed this one.

Once the pan is hot, I pour a little bit of mix into it and rapidly tilt it round until the bottom of the pan is covered. You need to judge the amount right, but too much is better than too little - too much and you get thick pancakes, too little and you get mangled pancakes.

Once the bottom of the pan is covered, I left it on the heat, shaking the pan occasionally until the pancake moved freely on it (don't worry if it sticks at first - it will do that until the base is cooked). Once it was at that state I peeked at the bottom every now and then to see what colour it was and when it was the right colour (it should be a light golden brown, but I'm sure you know what pancakes look like) flipped it over and repeated the process of occasional peeking until it was the right colour (this side shouldn't stick).

I then served with lemon juice and sugar. I'd intended to try some sort of savoury vegetable filling as a nod to a balanced diet (with Ollie, my lunchtime provider of salads, currently in deepest darkest India, the vegetable content in my diet isn't great at the moment), but I didn't. Why? Because a) A savoury vegetable filling was more work and b) Lemon juice and sugar is just too damn nice.

Conclusion

Mmm. Pancakes.

What don't you eat? (How to feed anyone)

2007-01-27T02:38:00.000-08:00

I was out for dinner with a friend last night and she wouldn't eat the squid in her seafood dish. Nothing wrong with that - we all have things we don't like - but it, combined with reading through the latest post on Smitten Kitchen in a vain attempt to stave off the cravings induced by StumbleUpon being down today, made be think about the subject.

Which is not to say it made me think coherently about the subject. It is a saturday morning. So the following is more of a brain dump than a well thought out argument. Also it contains no cooking. If you were hoping for a recipe accompanied my fun filled antics and tomfoolery in the kitchen, you might want to give up and go back to bed now.

I think I'm pretty open minded about food. I'll eat most things, within the restriction that I only eat a restricted subset of meats. I don't eat Okra if I can avoid it (it's the devil's vegetable), and I don't drink wine or beer, but that's about it. I also don't eat bad food, but that's a separate issue related to me being a snob rather than food related. :-) On the other hand, I used to not eat dairy either, so I'm reasonably familiar with the difficulties of working on a restricted diet.

I know a lot of other people who are very fussy eaters, either by nature, moral choice or medical neccessity. Amongst my friends and family we have nut allergies, dairy intolerance, gluten intolerance. One of my friends can't eat sweet peppers. Moral choice is more obvious - I know quite a few vegetarians of varying degrees and lived with a vegan friend for somewhat over a year.

Then there are people who have things which they just don't like to eat (and things who have people whom they just don't like to eat, but that's a separate post). Some of my friends basically don't eat vegetables, or don't like specific vegetables. Mushrooms seem to be the fungi which everyone loves to hate. My brother's girlfriend doesn't eat anything which is purple.

There's a tendency to roll one's eyes and tell them to stop being so fussy. I'm certainly guilty of it (but then I'm judgmental and horrible. Ask anyone).

To some extent this is warranted - I can't imagine not eating most vegetables, and I find it amazingly difficult to accommodate people don't. But part of that is just me - I'm sure if I stuck a great big slab of bacon on their plate they'd be happy as a pig in... ok, bad metaphor. But you get the point. I'm sure they'd find it similarly difficult to feed me.

On the other hand, maybe we should think of restrictions as opportunities. In my presentation on vegan cooking I mentioned that there are basically two secrets to good vegan cooking: Variety and proper use of spices. Neither of these are particularly vegan centric - they're just things which happen to be especially important for vegan cooking. Once you've learned them you can port them to any other style of cooking you like, and you'll be a better cook for it.

I'm sure other genres of cooking are the same. In cutting something out of the mix you will expose limitations to your cooking style which its presence has helped to cover up and, in learning to deal with these limitations, you will become a better cook for it.

So. What don't you eat?

What do you eat? (How to feed a vegan)

2007-01-25T11:34:00.000-08:00

I've just given a talk at work entitled "What do you eat? (How to feed a vegan)". (It was part of our training on giving presentations). Just thought I'd post a copy of the slides.

They're probably not the most enthralling thing in the world if you weren't attending the presentation (which was, of course, fantastic), but some people might find them interesting.

Guacamole and playing with new toys

2007-01-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

Gosh? Is this thing still here? I suppose I'd better post something to it then. :-)

I've been lacking the energy to play recently, but some new kitchen toys and a renewed attempt at acquiring the energy may result in more posts in the near future.

Yesterday I had a problem. Two problems in fact.

1) My kitchen was resplendent with several exciting new sharp implements (Remember: A well armed kitchen is a polite kitchen) which were not being used. Not least among these was a food processor with more attachments than your average Swiss army.
2) For reasons which are beyond the scope of this article, I had an awful lot of avocado which were getting very ripe.

Obvious conclusion: Guacamole!

Now, I was far from my cookbooks (ok, I was 5 minutes walk from my cookbooks, but I was in Sainsburys and they weren't), and I've never made guacamole before in my life. What to do, what to do... Enterprising young chef that I am, I hit upon a cunning plan.

Ok, it wasn't very cunning. I picked up a tub of Sainsburys own brand guacamole and looked at the label.

But it could have been a cunning plan.

Tomatoes, coriander, lemon, chilli, sour cream, a little bit of avocado, etc. No great surprises. I set off to raid the store for ingredients.

First hitch, coriander. They had plenty of coriander. However, it looked really sad. And I mean *really* sad. This isn't "Kicked puppy" sadness so much as "I've just read the entirety of war and peace in one sitting and have now lost all will to live" sadness. It was that sad. So, substitution time. I picked up a pack of flat leaf parsley instead.

Next substitution: They were out of sour cream. This time War and Peace was inflicted upon me. Visions of guacamole receded into the distance, laughing as they ran.

Oh well. Creme fraiche is almost like sour cream, right?

A quick detour via the checkout and time to run gleefully home to attack my new purchases with spinning blades (of doom).

What I used:

3 largeish and very ripe avocados
4 smallish and rather pathetic looking not very ripe tomatoes
1/2 a medium sized red onion.
1 lime
1 lemon
3 small cloves of garlic
A medium sized bunch of flat leaf parsley.
half a tsp of powdered chilli
2 tsp salt
2 tsp brown sugar
250ml Creme Fraiche.

What I did:

It's not really rocket science. :-) The short answer is "Blended everything until it was thoroughly gooped". You can skip the rest of this section now.

Squeezed the lemon and lime (using my cool and shiny juicer attachment on the food processor).

Switched over to the spinning blades of doom and added the onion, garlic, salt, sugar and chilli. Span until ingredients were thoroughly doomed.

Added the tomatoes and doomed them too, then the avocado, then the parsley. (I didn't want the parsley too fine, which is why I added it after there was a healthy quantity of goop to act as buffer).

Finally added the creme fraiche and ran the food processor until it was all mixed.

Conclusion:

Here's a quote from immediately after making this:

< David > That is a) An awful lot of guacamole and b) An awful lot of really damn good guacamole. :)

I don't really have much further to add to that, except that maybe it would be worth cooking the onion first next time - the recipe doesn't taste too oniony, but it has quite a strong aftertaste of it. Some cumin might not go amiss either.

Quick American style pancakes

2006-11-11T03:50:00.000-08:00

Recipe by request. :-) This recipe makes 4-6 pancakes. It's a largeish breakfast for one person, or about right for a medium-light breakfast for two.

Ingredients:

These are only approximate. You can fiddle them a bit in either direction and it works fine.

1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup of yoghurt
1/4 cup of milk.
1 egg
1 tsp vegetable oil

Process:

I use a single fairly large measuring jug to do all the mixing in. It's convenient, saves washing up, lets me pour the mix directly onto the frying pan, and lets me measure as I add things in.

Add all the liquid ingredients into the measure cup. Stir until reasonably well mixed. Add all the dry ingredients in. Stir again until reasonably well mixed (you don't need to get all the lumps out - just the big ones). And you're done. Time to cook. :-)

Cook them on a nonstick frying pan (no oil!) on a medium-low heat. You can cook them on a higher heat if you want (I do, but that's because I have a gas hob and can't *do* medium heat), but you'll need to flip them fairly constantly. On the medium low heat you can wait until the pancakes start to bubble and then flip them the once.

The end result should be a golden brown colour on both sides, not too dark, and not still uncooked inside.

Total cooking time: The mix takes about five minutes, the cooking maybe 10-15.

Sweet and Spicy Peppers with Bulgur Wheat

2006-09-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

So, I've been incredibly lax about posting recently (where by recently I mean 'for the last six months or more'). I'm going to try and fix that, but to be honest I'm going to fail. Still, here's a post.

Part of the reason for the lack of post is I haven't been cooking very well recently. Lack of energy. Tonight I really felt the need for a good meal, but I wanted something simple owing to aforementioned lack of energy. Here's what I came up with.

What I used

Olive oil (unspecified quantity - enough to cover the bottom of the pan)
3 sweet peppers (2 yellow, 1 red)
1 red onion
3 cloves of garlic
6 smallish tomatoes
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp powdered red chilli
1 cup durum wheat
1.5 cups water

What I did

Err. Not much really. :-)

First, the durum. This is trivial. Put 1 cup durum wheat and 1.5 cups water in a rice cooker. Press the 'on' button. Leave to cook.

I thinly sliced the onion and sweet peppers and fried them with the olive oil, garlic, sugar and salt. I started the onions a few minutes before the peppers. I coarsely chopped the tomatoes and, once the peppers were looking reasonably cooked, added them and the chilli to the mixture. I left this to cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomato reduced to a thick sauce and the peppers tasted cooked.

Conclusion

Nice, simple, effective. I'm a big fan of durum wheat at the moment - it's like cous cous, only much harder to go wrong with. It's nice for dishes that I would normally have with rice.

The peppers were very good. I think they needed frying for longer before adding the tomatoes (peppers don't cook very well in liquid), but other than that I can't think anything I would have done differently. Maybe slightly more chilli and less salt.

Mushroom and Chickpea Balti

2006-05-21T04:51:00.000-07:00

In my weekly trip to the local second hand bookstall I recently picked up a new cookbook, entitled Balti: The complete cookbook, by Lynette Baxter. To be honest, I'm not very impressed with it, but at two pounds if I get one recipe from it that I cook on a regular basis then I'll be satisfied with my purchase.

The following is approximately from it. The ingredients list bears a passing resemblance to a recipe of the same name in the book (I forget how much resemlance it actually bears - I didn't do much more than scan the recipe). I'm pretty sure the actual cooking method doesn't. It needs some work, but given that it will probably prove to be a nice easy recipe to cook when I don't feel like putting much effort into it.

What I used:

1 Red Onion
3 cloves garlic
5 smallish tomatoes
2 cans of chickpeas
250g closed cap mushrooms.
1 fresh birds eye chilli
1/2 cup water
Sunflower oil
Salt
Brown sugar
1tsp Fenugreek seeds
2tsp Cumin seeds
1tsp Cardamon seeds
2tsp whole black peppercorns
1cm of cinnamom stick

What I did:

I began pretty much as usual. Toasted the spices, ground them up in a mortar and pestle and then put them aside. I then chopped up the onion and garlic quite finely and fried it with a bit of salt and sugar in the oil. After about 5-10 minutes I added the spice to the mix and continued frying.

While that was frying I cleaned the mushrooms and chopped them up fairly coarsely. After the onions had been frying with the spices for a few minutes I added them and continued frying until the mushrooms were fairly well cooked, stirring it pretty thoroughly so that the mushrooms were properly coated with the spice and onion mix.

Meanwhile I chopped the tomatoes and, once the mushrooms were cooked, added them to the mix. I turned up the heat and let it fry for a few more minutes then added half a cup of water and simmered until the tomatoes had reduced to a sauce. I drained the chickpeas, added them to the mix and stirred thoroughly, letting it cook for another five minutes or so. The end result was enough sauce to coat the chickpeas, but not enough that they were swimming in it.

So, pretty much what you'd expect given the ingredients list. I think it's not what was suggested in the cookbook, but clearly my way is better. :-)

Conclusion

This was pretty good, but the spice mix was a bit odd. It didn't quite work. I think it needed to lose the cinnamon and possibly include some mustard seeds, coriander and more cumin.

I served it simply over brown rice. It could probably use some sort of simple vegetable side dish to go with it.

Brown rice in an egg and tomato sauce

2006-05-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

Glory and behold: There is a post!

I'm sorry about the long long delay. My main excuse at the moment is that I don't have any internet access at home right now. This is being written during my lunch break at work.

But enough of excuses. On to food.

About a week ago I came home one evening, in that in between zone of botheredness where I do feel like cooking but going shopping for food was simply too much effort.

So. What did I have in the fridge? There was a largeish tub left over of roast vegetables (a mix of onions, garlic, peppers, courgettes, aubergine, tomatoes and mushrooms, roasted with an awful lot of salt and olive oil), so that would serve as a good vegetable side dish. I just needed a main dish to serve it with.

The fridge wasn't quite bare other than that, but it was certainly scantily clad. After some digging around I settled on the some cold leftover brown rice, 5 medium sized vine tomatoes, a carton of eggs. There might have been one or two other things, but those were all I ended up using in terms of primary ingredients. I also had a fresh basil plant sitting on the window sill and some colmanns mustard, both of which I used for flavouring. Plus of course miscellaneous cupboard ingredients.

Now. What to make with them?

In envisioned some sort of fried rice type thing - scrambled eggs with fried tomatoes and rice. Sounded nice enough. This wasn't quite how it turned out...

What I used.

Cold cooked brown rice. Probably about the equivalent of 2.5 cups dry volume.
5 medium sized tomatoes.
4 eggs
A small handful of fresh basil
Colmann's mustard
Balsamic vinegar
Olive oil
Brown sugar
Salt
Pepper
Roast vegetable mix

What I did.

I knew the tomatoes would give off quite a lot of water, so I decided to fry them first to reduce some of that. I diced them up fairly coarsely, heated a fair bit of olive oil in the frying pan and set them to frying with a bit of salt and sugar. After a few minutes I shredded the basil and added it to the tomatoes.

It was obvious pretty quickly that there was a basic flaw in my plan. Diced tomatoes don't so much fry as turn into sauce. That's ok. I can work with that...

Before I continue, I should explain briefly the phenomenon that is Colman's mustard. It looks like a fairly generic yellow mustard, but it is in fact ridiculously spicy. My friend Vern, who recently came over to visit from the wrong side of the pond, first encountered it when we were both visiting my family. He thought at first that it was similar to French's (a mustard which, as far as I can verify, tastes mostly of yellow), and my brother and I were rather impressed at the size of the helping he took.

He later described it as "Spicy death mustard".

So, I was going to be verrrry careful with my use of it.

The way I used it might strike you as slightly odd. However, that's only because it's a slightly odd way of using it. I cracked the four eggs into a bowl, added about 3tbsp of balsamic vinegar, a tsp of brown sugar and maybe half a tsp of Colman's mustard and whisked it all up. I've done variants on this before, where I've added small amounts of vinegar and soy sauce to eggs before using them in chinese style fried rice, and it usually works quite well.

Now there was a slight problem. I wanted to keep the egg distinct from the tomato while it was cooking. Partially because I still thought it was going to become fairly solid, partially because I'm always leery of undercooked egg and mixing it with liquid make it fairly hard to tell if egg is sufficiently cooked.

"Ah ha" thought I. "Am I not an engineer now? Well, I shall think like an engineer!" (ok, so technically I build web applications rather than bridges. But I'm sure the principle is the same. Although granted fewer people are likely to die horrifically if my web applications crash...). The resulting dam of brown rice across the frying pan wasn't going to win any prizes, but it certainly served the purpose of partitioning the frying pan into the bit where the sauce cooked and the bit where the egg cooked.

It also meant that there wasn't all that much surface area for the egg to cook on, and there was rather a lot of egg. Also, adding the mustard and that much liquid seemed to do interesting things to the consistency of the egg. It wasn't cooking very well, so I turned up the heat and stirred continuously.

What I was left with was a somewhat unappetising looking vaguely grey porridge.

Never mind. We soldier on.

I mixed the rice, sauce and egg up together. The unappetising grey colour gave way to a slightly orange sauce coating the rice. Much more appealing, although perhaps a little gloopy.

I tried a bit. Nice, but perhaps a little unexciting. I decided that it would work better with the roast vegetables mixed in rather than on the side, so I added those. Perhaps two or three cups of roast vegetables? I'm not really sure.

It was definitely an improvement. It tasted really quite nice now. I was just a little disappointed with the spicy death mustard - you could hardly taste it really. So I decided to add a fair bit more, and mixed in about half a tbsp more and fried it for a little longer.

I took another bite.

You know what's coming, don't you?

In fact, you probably know what's coming so well that there's really no need for me to regail you with stories of my prancing around the kitchen screaming in horror at the blazing fire that had been lit upon my tastebuds.

Right?

Just as well really, because it wasn't that spicy. The mustard added just the right undertone of bite to it without making it actually hot.

Conclusion

Definitely a recipe worth remembering. I've actually made it again since first cooking it.

Having tinkered with the quantities, the only major change I've made to it is I've reduced the amount of vinegar slightly. I've tried it without the roast vegetables, and really they are a neccesary part of the recipe - it just isn't interesting enough without something like that in it.

If you don't have the vegetables preroast then you could probably replace them with just frying peppers, mushrooms and onions and adding them to the recipe (or cooking the sauce with them after they've fried for a bit).

I don't think this recipe is actually original to me - I have vague recollections of my mother cooking something similar. I wouldn't swear to it though, and I certainly don't know what it's called.

I suck

2006-03-18T05:14:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone.

I'm sorry for the lack of updates, and even more sorry for the lack of an explanation. So, here's an explanation and hopefully at some point I'll follow with an update. Don't know when.

As some of you know, I started a new job in february. This, combined with a few weeks of illness, have left me not feeling very much inclined towards playing with my food. I've pretty much just been cooking stock recipes of mine.

On top of that, what little food writing I've been doing has happened at my new 'column' over at SoMinty. I meant to point people towards that when it started, but I err... didn't. Now, this is not a replacement for "Playing with your food". They serve very different functions. It just happens that it's easier to write about subjects I already know than it is to experiment with new recipes, which is why they've been getting all the posts.

So. Once again, I suck. Things will hopefully get better within the next month, but not promises. In the mean time, check out some of the links on the right to keep you amused.

The Glory of Salads

2006-02-05T05:43:00.000-08:00

Today I'm going to talk to you about salads. This is a subject I feel quite strongly about, so the post is going to be full of hyperbole and over the top language. But, let's be honest, when are my posts not?

You probably think salads are boring. Some lettuce, cucumber, maybe tomatoes and carrots if you're lucky. In order to make them interesting you need to pile them with dressing. Right?

Wrong! Wrong wrong wrong.

Indeed, mere words cannot express how wrong this is. So instead I am going to have to refer you to some higher authorities.

Here is what the bible has to say on the subject:

"Thou shalt not put the cucumber and a measly supermarket tomato on the lettuce and call it a salad, for that is an abomination."

After a consultation with the Eschaton, it was convinced that the matter was of sufficiently great importance that the following appeared across the galaxy.

"4. Thou shalt not make boring salads within my historic light cone. Or else."

Finally, if these have not convinced you of the severity of the situation, if you make boring salads then these cute kittens will cry.

So, on reflection, if you make boring salads then you will go to hell, your civilisation will be wiped out by a passing asteroid, and kittens will cry. Moreover, you will have a boring salad.

Now, I must explain how one goes about making an interesting salad.

The first myth to be disposed of is that a lot of dressing will make an interesting salad. If you put dressing on a boring salad then what you have is a boring salad covered in dressing. This might be edible, but it's not an interesting salad.

The second thing to bear in mind about dressing is that, given a decent salad, it isn't neccesary. I'm not saying it's a bad thing - I really like salad dressing. But the more ingredients your salad has, the more the dressing becomes just an accompaniment to the salad - it's not an integral part of it, and can quite happily be left out.

Implicit in this is that real salads should have a number of different ingredients. If you're only going to have a few ingredients then they should be interesting ones.

For example, the salad I had for lunch today contained the following ingredients: Romaine lettuce (never ever use iceberg lettuce. It is the devil's leaf.), sundried tomatoes, half an orange sweet pepper, two hard boiled eggs and a banana (do not doubt the use of banana in salad until you have tried it. It is awesome.).

I considered this to be a fairly basic salad. Ideally I'd have added some avocado, maybe a few capers, some seared red onion, etc. to it, but I didn't have the first two and couldn't be bothered to cook the third.

So, here is a list of some worthwhile salad ingredients. It is in no way exhaustive, and I'm definitely not suggesting you use all of them in a single salad.

Lettuce of course. My favourites are Romaine and little gems, but there is a wide variety of opinion on this. However the people who think iceberg lettuce is appropriate are simply wrong.

Cucumber fulfills a similar role to lettuce - it's nice, bulks up the salad a bit, and has a simple flavour to it. It isn't however in itself very interesting.

Carrots. Good quality carrots have a wonderful texture to them, and chopped or shredded (this is distinct from grated) carrot in a salad is very nice.

Good quality fresh tomatoes. None of those boring tasteless default supermarket tomatoes.

Avocado.

Sundried tomatoes.

Capers

Egg. Either scrambled (to the point where it's dry rather than runny) or hard boiled.

Roast squash.

Sweet peppers. Either raw or cooked.

Good cheeses. Especially feta or mozzarrela.

Banana.

Raisins or sultanas.

Green beans.

Chickpeas.

Kidney beans.

Seared onion. Red is best here. You can also include them raw, but I don't like it.

Tuna fish.

Anchovies.

Artichoke hearts.

Just about anything else that's edible cold.

One particular combination (which I can't eat any more) that works really well is that of banana, sundried tomatoes and feta. I know you're probably looking skeptical at this, but try it anyway and then come back and yell at me if you're still not convinced.

Having put together these salads, you can then drizzle dressing over them - vinaigrette, honey-mustard, sesame and soy sauce, whatever you feel like as long as it's interesting.

So, spread the word. Salads can - and should - be interesting, and people who make boring salads will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Cooking lessons 3

2006-01-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

This is going to get hopelessly out of order very quickly, as there are now two lessons I've missed out on actually posting. Never mind.

Yesterday I took Michael spice shopping. I was actually a bit unimpressed with where we went, so if anyone can tell me some good places to go spice shopping in London I'll be really grateful. We bought ground cumin, ground red chilli, garam masala and (gasp) curry powder. I went for all powders because they're a bit easier to work with to start with. Also because the selection of whole spices was crap. We can get on to the subtleties of spice usage once we've covered the basics, and once I've found a decent place to go shopping for them.

Here's one of the first Indian recipes I ever learned to cook, about four years back when I was first trying out this 'vegetarian' thing and Tariq came into our kitchen and found my attempts at making a curry. They were umm... not very impressive. Ask nicely and I'll tell you about it some time. Here is a very simplified and tinkered with version of the recipe he showed me.

Ingredients

One small bowl of lentils (about a serving size in order to make two to three servings). Preferably green, brown, puy, etc. Black or red won't really work here.

One medium-large onion.

Sunflower oil.

One large spoon of ground cumin.

One spoon of garam masala.

A quarter of a spoon of curry powder.

Water.

Salt to taste.

Instructions

Mix the dried spices and salt. Dry fry them on a medium heat for about a minute, stirring constantly, and then transfer to a bowl.

Add enough oil to the bottom of the pan to just cover it. Dice the onion and fry it on medium heat until soft, and then add the spices. Fry for a few minutes more.

Now add the lentils and fry for about a minute. Cover with boiling water (say two to three times as much water as you had lentils) and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to simmer, cover the pot, and leave it.

It will probably take about half an hour to cook. Be more worried about undercooking it than overcooking, but check on it every now and then to see if it's getting dry and needs more water. The end result can either be dryish or soupy as you prefer. If it's going to be soupy you might want to consider adding more salt and/or (horrors) half a stock cube. When the lentils are soft to eat it is ready.

Cooking lessons 2

2006-01-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Right, here's the first real cooking lesson. There would have been one before this in which I discussed how to make the garlic lentils in a slightly more sane manner, but stuff got in the way. So I didn't.

At the moment Michael is still spice free, causing me to need to be vaguely creative to work with the limited flavourings and ingredients available. Here's what I came up with as a suggested dinner for tonight. It's basically a mixture of things which are easy to make.

Pan fried potatoes

These have, for all intents and purposes, no nutritional value. However they taste great and are cheap and easy to make, so why complain?

First of all, you'll need boiled potatoes for this. Cold is better, because hot potatoes are a nuisance to cut and don't retain their shape as well, but either is fine. So, first we need to boil some potatoes. I recommend making excess potato and storing the rest in those sandwich bags I told you to get, as these are always useful to have to hand and if you have precooked potato in the fridge then this becomes even easier to make.

This is a complicated procedure akin to rocket science. You take a large quantity of unpeeled potatoes, given them a rinse and put them in a pot. You cover it with water. Put the heat on high until the water boils and then reduce the heat to medium and leave it to cook. Check them after about 20 minutes, and remove when cooked. They need to be soft when you stick a knife into them (check several as this will vary with potato size and they're better slightly overcooked than undercooked).

Once the potatoes are cooked, let them cool for a bit (it may help to leave them to sit in a pot of cold water for a few minutes), then cut them up into roughly cm cubes (you don't need to be too careful when doing this).

Now get a frying pan and add enough oil to cover the bottom in a thin layer. You may want to add a small amount of butter as well. Let it get hot and then add the potato cubes and sprinkle a fair bit of salt over the potatoes.

This will need to fry for quite a while until the cubes get crispy. Stir it every minute or so, but not constantly - prolonged contact with the frying pan is needed to crip the potatoes.

Spicy tomato sauce

Ingredients: One medium sized onion, garlic puree, lazy chillies, tomato passata, oil, salt

What to do:

Dice the onion fairly finely. Fry on medium heat with a little bit of oil and a pinch of salt.

After about five minutes, add a small spoon of lazy chillies and garlic puree (slightly more garlic than chillies if anything) to the onions and continue stirring until the onions are soft. Then add about half a bottle of passata, mix it up thoroughly and reduce the heat. Leave it on a low heat, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens.

Serve with the pan fried potatoes (you probably don't want to put the sauce directly on them, as it will soak in and they'll lose their crispiness. Serve on the side and mix as you eat).

Next post: Salads.

Cooking lessons 1

2006-01-14T03:10:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I was walking through London with a friend of mine. For the sake of the argument let's call him something implausible like Michael. In the course of conversation two things came up. Firstly, that he was very low on money. Secondly, that he wanted to go to McDonalds because he could get a meal's worth of food for only five pounds there.

Needless to say I objected rather strongly to this statement. Both to the notion that one can acquire food at McDonalds and to the notion that five pounds for a meal is good value. And so it arised that I would be teaching Michael how to cook.

Michael has now returned from the barbarian lands which he calls home, and so the lessons are to begin. Because it will allow others to benefit from them, and because I'm a total show off, I'll be doing it via a series of blog posts.

Today is shopping day, and I'm suggesting a list of bare minimals he'll want to stock before we do this. Spices will come later, as I refuse to instruct anyone to buy spices at a supermarket.

Cooking implements and general kitchen stuff

He actually has most of these, but I'm including it for completeness. Some of these aren't essential, and one can always improvise, but it's irritating to have to do so.

Cutting board

Sharp knife

Frying pan

Pot (Having two pots is ideal, but not neccesary)

Wooden spoon

Cooking spatula.

Large sandwich bags

Cheese grater

Aluminium foil

Cooking essentials

These are the ingredients which I feel it would be useful to always have to hand.

Sunflower oil. This can be as cheap as you can find.

Garlic puree

"Very lazy chillies"

Table salt

A couple packs of green, brown and red lentils respectively

A couple bottles of tomato passata.

White rice. Preferably basmati.

Stock cubes. Something of midrange quality is likely fine.

Bag of cheap white onions.

Bag of potatoes

Marmite

Soy sauce

Sugar, preferably brown

Not all of these are things I would use. I've replaced some of my ingredients with equivalent shortcuts.

Short term stuff

Things which I'd recommend picking up in the short term. This is definitely not a required list, but will give rise to some nice easy starting meals.

Eggs

Carrots

Cucumber

Fresh fish from the fish counter - if you buy whole fish rather than steak you can find some quite reasonably priced examples.

Other stuff

I like to have the following around, but it's totally nonessential.

Balsamic vinegar

Sesame oil

Miso (if you get the fish I recommend picking up some of this)

Sweet chilli sauce

Sweet carrots and chickpeas

2006-01-13T04:27:00.000-08:00

About a week ago when it was one of my nights to cook for the family I was talking with Boy. The proposed dinner plan was a chestnut and sweet potato curry, and I asked him if he'd be ok with that. He said yes, which I was pleasantly surprised by. Then he said something else.

"It doesn't really matter what you put in a curry anyway."

Excuse me?

"Well, once you've put the onion and curry powder and stuff in it all tastes the same."

I can't remember what I actually said in reply to this, but I suspect it wasn't more coherent than vague sputtering noises.

Later when eating the curry he observed "See what I mean? You can hardly taste the sweet potato or chestnut."

On the one hand, he was wrong. The curry was basically chunks of sweet potato and a spicy chestnut sauce. The chestnut was subtle, sure, but chestnut sauces are always mild. On the other hand, he did have a point. My spice selection has become a bit lacking in variety recently. So I've been meaning to experiment with more interesting combinations.

Today's recipe was a case of that. I was hungry and didn't have any convenient food (and didn't want eggs, as I had far too many of them yesterday), so I decided to cook something. Here's how it went.

What I used:

Two largish carrots
Two small onions
Can of kala chana (brown chickpeas)
Handful of raisins
2 tbsp sunflower oil
About 3cm cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamon seeds
4 cloves
2 dried red chillis
1/2 tbsp coarse salt

What I did:

First of all I dry fried all the spices and then ground them in the mortar and pestle. The grumbling about this can be taken as read.

I'd had quite a lot of success with the shredding implement on the food processor yesterday when making the latkes, so rather than fussing around with chopping things I just peeled the carrots and onions and shoved them through it. Instant well chopped carrot and onion for almost no work. I think I could very easily grow to like this attachment...

So, I heated the oil in the pan, added the carrots and onions and fried for a few minutes. Then I added the spices and continued frying it until the carrots had softened somewhat.

At this point I decided it would be a crime not to have raisins with the carrots, so I took a handful of them and added them in and continued frying, adding the kala chana a few minutes later. Fried it for another five minutes or so then took it off the heat and covered it for another five while I heated up the pita bread to eat it with.

Conclusion

Very nice. The combination of sweet and spicy worked very well as usual, and it augmented the flavour of the carrot wonderfully. Also, with the food processor to do most of the work, this was incredibly easy. The spice could possibly have done with being slightly milder. I think when I make it again I'll only use one chilli.

Latkes

2006-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

I was bored.

I don't just mean the sort of boredom that arises from not being very interested in what you are doing, I mean the sort of soul crushing mind numbing boredom that rises up from the deep, saps you of all your energy and causes you to reach the point where anything you might do to prevent the boredom just seems like too much work.

As you can imagine, this sort of boredom is a problem. I get it a lot, and being currently unemployed (which will change soon, hurrah! I just need to decide which offer to accept.) while all my friends are gainfully employed in jobs or PhDs, I'm particularly prone to it at the moment. There are plenty of things I could be doing, but if I get into a slump then they all seem like too much effort.

This time however, a solution arose. Lunchtime.

My stomach grumbled. "David", it said "I hunger. You should feed me."

"I don't know. That sounds like a lot of work.

"Yeah, it is. But if you don't feed me then I'll be forced to escape from your body and go on a rampage. Millions will die to sate my hunger, and it will be all your fault."

"Hmm. Well, that would be bad, yes. But I'm still not sure..."

My brain chimed in. "Yes. You should cook something. I'm bored out of your mind here. Cook something new and write it up for 'Playing with your food'. That way you'll have an hour or two of entertainment, and your three readers will get something to amuse them as well."

"Alright, alright. You've convinced me."

When your body parts conspire against you there's really nothing to do but to go along with their wishes.

Unfortunately I was still uninspired. This needed to be remedied if I were to effectively produce a new meal. So, Robin, to the blogmobile!

My method of finding new cooking blogs to peruse was very simple. I wandered over to Food, in the main... and clicked on every link on the right hand side of the page.

Eventually I settled on this. I've heard about latkes before and I keep thinking "Hmm, I should try to make those." but never get around to it. Well, the time for procrastination was over. Latkes it is.

Purely by chance, somewhere in between deciding on this and cooking it I thought I'd check my weight (I haven't in months) and noted that I'd somehow managed to drop down to about my desired ideal weight with no conscious effort on my part. Right after christmas and new years.

How much oil was in that recipe again?

Anyway, time for some cooking.

What I used

About 7 small to medium potatoes, peeled
Three small white onions
1/2 tbsp of salt
Two eggs
1/2 a cup of flour
1/2 a cup of sunflower oil
1/2 tsp baking soda

What I did

As you will probably have noticed if you've followed the above link, there's not really an awful lot of resemblance between my ingredients and Debbie's ingredients. They're the same sort of things, but the quantities are only tangentially related. This is in part due to my usual tendency to adapt, in part because I peel potatoes on autopilot and peeled far more potatoes than I actually needed before I knew it, and mostly because the recipe was all the way upstairs and it would be so much work to go up and check it.

I used the grateresque attachment for the food processor and got a large pile of shredded potato. As directed I put it into a metal colander and squeezed as much of the juice out as I could, but it was still quite damp. It was at this point I decided to employ low cunning to complete the task and sprinkled the salt over it, mixed it up thoroughly and went to do the onions. These I decided that rather than shredding I would do with the normal processor blades, turning them into more of an onion puree.

As an idle observation, if you run the grater attachment to the food processor and just drop a potato on top of it then it bounces about in an amusing manner. I can't help but imagine the little potato pleading for its life as it avoids the spinning blades.

But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I'd decided to mix the Latkes in the kenwood. Why? Because I'm lazy, that's why. And it's the same amount of washing up, so why not? I transferred the onion to the kenwood bowl and returned my attention to the potato. The salt had done its work quite admirably and I was able to squeeze a lot more liquid out of it. Having done so I transferred it to the kenwood as well.

I then added the eggs, flour and baking soda and mixed it all up. It produced a batter with a texture fairly similar to my normal pancake mix, which was encouraging.

I then poured the oil into a nonstick pan and heated it. At this point I looked at the pan, slightly disbelieving. Buddha on a pogo stick that's a lot of oil... I know I have recipes which use almost that much oil, but that's in a large curry. The sole purpose of this oil is for frying things in. This somehow makes it more alarming.

Anyway, I used a heaped spoonfull of batter for each latke. The pan fit about four of them, and there was enough batter to make eight. I fried them for five minutes on each side until they were a darkish brown.

Towards the point where I wanted to flip the first batch I noticed that the best spatula was currently in a pile of washing up leftover from my brother cooking bacon and egg earlier (the irony amused me briefly). I quickly washed it up and moved to flip the latkes.

Point of reference? Putting a wet spatula into very hot oil isn't a great idea. Ouch.

Anyway, latkes duly flipped, they cooked for another five minutes and then I transferred them to a plate and put the next batch on.

Conclusion

I was already pretty sure these would be good. They smelled wonderful.

Good lord. They tasted even better. These are really really good.

I'd made far more than I was going to be able to eat, so I rushed upstairs to get the Boy. ('The Boy' is my affectionate name for my brother).

"Boy", says I, "Would you like to try something indescribably delicious?"

The Boy is skeptical. I cook strange and unnatural things, with vegetables and hardly any dead animal to speak of. However upon my description of what a latke is ("It's basically a pancake made out of shredded potato and onion") he is convinced to give it a go.

The Boy agrees. They're really very good. He's rather full from having had the aforementioned bacon and egg, so he only has one, but I make up for this by having three (and another one halfway through writing this post). The rest will keep to be reheated in the oven later.

So, a definite success. They do generate a lot of washing up, and they do stink up the house, but they taste amazing.

The only thing I would do differently in future is make sure that they really were a quite dark brown. Some of them were slightly undercooked and, while still nice, they were a bit to soft inside and lacked the crispness of the really well cooked ones.

Spicy pumpkin and bean stew

2006-01-11T10:27:00.001-08:00

I still haven't learned my lesson with pumpkins and how much water they give off when you cook them. Eventually I'll figure it out, but until them I appear to be doomed to have watery pumpkin dishes. In the end it didn't turn out too badly. It was just a bit more of a soup than I'd intended it to be...

Anyway, on to the recipe. I'm afraid this is another one I didn't measure very carefully.

What I used

Lots of cinnamon (about 5cm)
Two dried red chillis
About half a tbsp of coarse sea salt
1/4 cup sunflower oil
Three small white onions
Lots of chopped pumpkin (maybe a bit under a kilo?)
Two cans of red kidney beans

What I did

First of all I had a pumpkin to dismember. As I've probably mentioned, my mother grows an awful lot of pumpkins. This is great, but when we have a large number of them we don't manage to sell it means that there's an awful lot of pumpkin to process.

This is normally a massive chore, but I for christmas I was given some extremely nice knives. All three of which tout themselves as the "World's sharpest knife", supplied by the rather dubiously named Twin Towers Trading (I can't view their site because a) They're idiots who don't know how to correctly design a site and b) I don't have flash installed). Sounds like it's the lead up to a massive joke and/or disaster, doesn't it?

It actually didn't. These turned out to be really good. The serrated carving knife in particular is scarily effective and cuts through the pumpkin almost effortlessly.

Good lord. I sound like an advert. But seriously, it's true. These things are great.

So, summary version for those of you whose eyes glazed over: One large pumpkin rendered into conveniently sized chunks. A lot of time spent, but relatively little effort. Most of it was bagged for later use or turned into soup, but the aforementioned about a kilo went into making this dinner.

Next, the spices. I dry fried the cinnamon and chillis (having broken them up suitably) and then powdered them in a mortar and pestle with the salt. Yes, this is exactly as much work as you think it is. I really need to get a spice grinder. (I suspect I've complained about this before, but blogger is currently down so I can't actually check. Also on to do list: Make local copies of my blog posts)

Towards the end of this my mother pointed out that the food processor had a mini attachment that would work well for spices. I looked skeptical, but was fed up so decided to give it a try. It worked about as well as I expected. Worse yet, it managed to not screw up in an entertaining fashion which I could relate to my enthralled audience. It just didn't do anything to them. At this point I declared the spices to be good enough.

Anyway, I now had a food processor that was going to need washing up anyway, and after two long and involved tasks I didn't really feel like chopping onions, so I just shoved them in the processor.

Now, obvious things ensued. Heat oil, add the onions, fry for about 5 minutes. Yawn. Add the powdered spice mix, fry for another five minutes. Taste the fried onion to make sure I'm not about to poison people (I wasn't. Mmm... cinnamon and chilli).

More standard obviousness continues. I added the pumpkin and fried for another five minutes. Added the beans and fried for another five minutes.

Hmm. At this point the recipe book says 'bring to the boil then reduce heat and simmer'. Errr... what? There's no water in this recipe. I double checked it and confirmed. No water. This presents me with a dilemma: Am I supposed to boil the pumpkin? How do I do that? Wikipedia lists the boiling point of carbon at about 4000k, and my oven barely reaches half that temperature!

Instead I resort to covering it and sticking it in the hot oven to see what would happen. After about 5-10 minutes I was somewhat skeptical about whether or not it was really doing anything, so I added boiling water to half cover the pumpkin and put it back in. This did indeed cook it, but of course once the pumpkin started cooking it began giving off its own water, ending up with what was really closer to a pumpkin soup. After about twenty minutes I uncovered it and put it back for another 15 in an attempt to reduce it a bit. This rather failed, but never mind.

Conclusion

This was really nice. I should have used less water of course (probably about half a cup of boiling water to start it off with steaming is enough), but the taste was great. The cinnamon was my own addition, and I consider it to be a total success - this would have been boring without it.

So, if you have prechopped pumpkin (and I'm going to for ages now) and a sane way of grinding spices then this is a low work recipe which tastes great. Definitely a winner.

Badass garlic lentils

2005-12-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably got an impression of a variety of exotic spices and subtle flavours. You no doubt see me as some sort of culinary master, spending hours slaving away in the kitchen to find the perfect recipe. Most likely you've even thought "Wow, that David is godlike in his mastery! I must bear his children!"

Alas, I am here to tell you that this simply isn't true. Behold my deep, dark secret: Some times I simply can't be bothered. I don't have the energy, the ingredients, or the time to put something fancy together, so it's time to just throw everything in a pot and see what happens. Occasionally, this works.

A frequent theme of this sort of cooking is lentils. It is very easy to produce something edible with lentils - you take a bunch of lentils, you stick 'em in a pot of water, you add stuff for flavouring. Cook until, well, cooked.

The following is an example of this. I won't even pretend I was measuring things...

What I used:

Garlic, lots (say about 5 cloves)
Coarse sea salt
Green lentils. I guess about 300g, but I'm only going on packet size here.
Stock cube
Marmite
Very lazy chillies (these appear to be chopped semi-dried chillies preserved in white wine vinegar. They appear to be about two months past their use by date, so I'm doing my best to use them up)
Olive oil
Bay leaves, handful (4? 5?)
Thyme
About a third of a bottle of sainsbury's tomato passata

What I did:

Pretty much what it says on the packet. Take lentils, stick them in water. Add a stock cube.

At this point I now hunt around the kitchen for other things to add. You don't think I planned this do you?

So, first thing I do is add garlic. I roasted this before hand (that's what the olive oil was for) and crush it slightly before adding it in. Whenever I roast garlic I add a fair bit of coarse sea salt to it as well to draw out the juices.

Now, to give it some flavour I added the bay leaves and thyme.

One of my standard tricks for improving the flavour of stocks is to add marmite to them. If you are unlucky enough to not be British (or Australian, which is practically british but with a better tan) then you might not be familiar with marmite, so let me explain this concept.

The classic ad for marmite which I always remember is you see a man walking along with a sandwich. He passes a homeless person and, feeling sorry for him, gives him half of the sandwich. The homeless person in question takes one bite of the sandwich, spits it out and starts yelling at the man.

Yes. This is an advertisement for the product. Their slogan is "You either love it or you hate it."

Allow me to clarify further. Marmite is an evil foul smelling black goop with the consistency of tar and the salt content of the dead sea. For reasons of cultural insanity the british choose to spread it on bread and willingly consume it.

It's actually quite nice.

Basically it's a yeast extract - originally from the leftovers from making beer. It's extremely salty and has a nice rich flavour to it when sufficiently diluted (or spread realllly thinly over warm toast and margarine). Consequently when added to a stock it really adds a lot of flavour to it.

I add a dollop of it. A few moments later I happen to notice the vegetable stock packet I've used, which proudly declares that it is guaranteed to be yeast free. That's nice. I add another dollop of marmite for good measure.

Finally, rummaging through the fridge I found the aforementioned lazy chillies. Checked the sell by date, confirmed that they were not now radioactive and decided that the lentils could use a bit of a kick to them. I added them to the stock and left it to cook for a bit longer.

About 10 minutes later I came back to the lentils, tasted them and decided they needed a bit more of a kick, so I added another dollop. At this point the lentils were getting cookedish, so I added the tomato (random bit of trivia: Tomato slows down the cooking process for lentils, so you shouldn't add it too soon. Of course, so does salt. At this point I suspect the marmite and roasted garlic had contributed enough salt to preserve a rhino). I left it to cook for another 10-20 minutes more and then served.

It was still very liquidy, so it was more of a lentil soup than anything. I took a sip.

Then I coughed and spluttered for a bit and drunk a lot of water to recover.

A bit of a kick? Try a mule's worth. These lentils kicked my ass. I bravely made a few more attempts at eating them, but simply couldn't do it.

So, I adopted the standard aga owner's approach to dealing with culinary disasters. Bung it in the simmering oven and forget about it.

I came back to it the next morning. The water had entirely evaporated off, leaving a slightly moist thing that was nothing so much as bits of brown in brown goo. Still, I shouldn't judge. Some of my best fr... err. what I mean is that I have a very nice pumpkin and brown lentil stew recipe which resembles nothing so much as raw sewage. You can't always tell if something is going to be awful by looking at it. So, I plucked up my courage and steeled myself for a bite.

Conclusion

Hey. That's actually pretty good.

For some reason the extra cooking really mellowed the spiciness. I think this is because the spice was all in the broth and the lentils weren't getting much of the flavour, but as it cooked the flavour soaked into the lentils. Still, this was by no means a subtle dish - the overriding flavour was garlic, with a strong complementary chilli flavour. Oh yes, and salt. Don't get me wrong, there were other flavours, but when you're reduced to considering marmite to be a nuance you know that this here recipe is not for food snobs.

I've actually made this again since, and simplified certain steps. Rather than roasting the garlic I just fried it (takes less time and saves washing up), cutting out the salt. I also cut out the thyme and bay leaves because, frankly, you couldn't taste a thing, and cooked it on a much higher heat than the simmering oven so it didn't take all night to cook.

So, all in all a nice and simple addition to the recipe book. Takes a while to cook, but it takes a while of being ignored to cook. Definitely one for future nights when I can't be bothered.

Pseudo-malaysian rice and lentils

2005-12-25T03:31:00.000-08:00

I've not been feeling in the mood for experimenting recently, so I haven't been updating the blog. I feel a bit bad about this, so I thought I'd do something simpler and share one of my 'standard' recipes. It won't be as interesting to read, but its definitely interesting to eat.

This is my version of a malaysian rice dish that someone once cooked for me. He didn't give me the full recipe, and what he did give me of it is only really approximated in this. I've also made my own modifications since.

It's a nice, relatively easy, rice dish with a great flavour to it. It's yet another of my flings with mixing sweet, savoury and spicy and I think it does a marvelous job of it. The only reason I would not recommend this recipe to someone is if they don't like coconut.

The ingredients of this one are a bit vague - I just improvise it with whichever of the fresh spices, etc. I have to hand, so it comes out somewhat different every time.

Ingredients

A couple tbsp of sunflower oil.
2 cups rice
1 cup green lentils
2 or 3 sweet peppers (different colours by preference)
4 or 5 carrots
About a dozen medium sized mushrooms

2 medium red onions
2 red chillies
3 small cloves of garlic
About 5cm of stem ginger
Half of a stick of fresh lemongrass
1 cup dessicated coconut

1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp fresh cumin
1/2 tsp cardamon
2 or 3 cm cinnamon

Instructions

Cook the rice and lentils until the rice is dry and the lentils are just on the hard side of cooked.

Meanwhile, lightly toast the cumin, cardamon and cinnamon (tearing the cinnamon up into little bits first), crush them and stick them in the food processor. Add the salt, sugar, onions, garlic, chillies, ginger, coconut and lemongrass. Pulse until they are very finely chopped and thoroughly mixed.

Chop the carrots into small cubes (a bit under a cm on a side), the peppers up into mediumish sized squares and slice the mushrooms thinly.

Heat the oil in a wok or frying pan and add the onion, etc. mix to it. Fry it for about 5-10 minutes, then add the carrots and after another 5 minutes the peppers, and then the mushrooms. Fry until the carrots are no longer crunchy but still not fully cooked, then add the rice and lentils. Continue frying until the rice/lentil mix is fully coated and the carrots are cooked (I use the simmering oven to finish the cooking when I have the aga).

This is better served hot of course, but it's actually quite nice cold. Also, I usually serve this with a salad to complement it.

Spicy Egg and Potatoes

2005-12-09T03:28:00.000-08:00

So, it's not yet noon and I sit here eating curry. "Why?", I hear you ask. It is because of the following conversation:

Me: Ooh, that looks good. I want to make something like that.
Also Me: What, now?
Me: Yes!
Also Me: But it's 10:30AM and we haven't eaten yet. That's clearly not breakfast food.
Me: I don't care.
Also Me: Lets eat something sensible.
Me: WANT!
Also Me: Oh fine. Be like that.
Me: Yay! Curry!

As you've probably noticed, I've recently been linked to by Naughty Curry (given that I had about 5 people reading this before, the chances are you came over here from there in the first place). Consequently I've been browsing their archives, and encountered a number of interesting spiced egg dishes. This one in particular inspired me.

Of course, by 'inspired' I don't mean to imply that I followed the recipe or anything so dramatic. That would just be silly. The dish looked nice: I certainly wouldn't say no if someone handed it to me (indeed I would probably be saying "Mind if I have some more?" in short order), but for various reasons I didn't really feel like making the specific dish. I've recently perfected my sweet and spicy coconut curry sauce recipe, so I'm a little tired of coconut. Also I tend to prefer to cook somewhat drier dishes, and do not as a rule include tomatoes in my cooking. So, when I say inspired what I really mean is "Wellll... there's egg in it. And onion and stuff". After all, I'm sure I know better about cooking Indian food than someone who's merely from India. Right...

Also, while browsing other sites linked from Naughty Curry I encountered this article. Very different from how I do things, but that doesn't neccesarily mean it's wrong. I am not above learning new things. So, I figured, why not?

Anyway, onwards and forwards to the recipe itself!

What I used:

2 medium red onions
4 medium-large potatoes
3 eggs (well, sortof).
2 large cloves of garlic
1.5 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp black onion seeds
3 dried red chillies
0.5 tsp turmeric
A bit over 0.5 tbsp course sea salt
2 tbsp sunflower oil

What I did:

Ok, the first thing to do is to cook the eggs and potatoes. The potatoes are unproblematic - bung them in boiling water until they're soft enough. (Saying that, I screwed up and undercooked them slightly, but this proved not to be a problem).

I hard cooked the eggs, following the instructions from 'The Good Egg'. The basic instructions go like this: Bring to nearly the boil, take off the heat and cover. Leave to sit for 15 minutes. Then replace the hot water with cold, add some ice and leave to cool.

I'd gotten to the leaving it to cool stage and had left it for about 5 minutes when I realised that she recommends you crack the top of the egg slightly. Presumably this allows the egg to peel away from the shell as it cools. So, I took one of the eggs and tapped it lightly against the side of the pan.

Splurge!

The egg broke apart to reveal white barely cooked egg goo. I was not impressed.

I have no idea what I did wrong, but I solved the problem with the remaining two by sticking them back on the heat and boiling the hell out of them. When I took them off the heat they were cooked perfectly.

Anyway, on to the actual recipe.

First I dry fried the whole spices to toast them lightly. Then I transferred them to a mortal and pestle and crushed them a little bit (not completely - about a quarter of the spices got powdered. The rest remained whole or slightly broken).

After I'd removed the spices I diced the onion coarsely and put it in the pan with the salt (and no oil). This fried surprisingly well all told - I think the salt really did help here. After about 5-10 minutes frying I added the spices to the onions.

At this point I observed that things really were burning onto the bottom of the pan quite spectacularly. That was unfortunate - if I let this state of affairs continue I would never ever get the damn thing clean. So I applied the standard steam cleaning trick: Push the food out of the way, pour a bit of water onto it. Let that steam for a moment to loosen the burned on stuff and then (before it all evaporates) scrape like hell with the spatula. Move food around to uncover a different part of the base, repeat. This done I continued to stir it and didn't need to do this again until I was already going to be adding some water anyway.

While that was cooking I diced the potatoes into cubes a bit under a cm on a side. I added these to the onions and then added the oil at this point - I wanted to make sure the potatoes were properly heated as they were undercooked. In the end this was probably unnecesary as I decided to add water to the mix to cook them, so after frying for another few minutes I half covered it with water, put a lid on the pot and left it, stirring occasionally. It probably took about 5-10 minutes before the potatoes were cooked.

At this point I was thinking it looked very brown, so I added some turmeric. Now it looked very brown but had turmeric in it.

Then I chopped the egg up (to about the size I would use for egg salad), added it to the mix and stirred for a little longer. The result was a rather unappetising looking brown mess.

Conclusion:

So, I now had a plateful of the aforementioned brown mess. Oh well, I suppose I'd better... Wow. That's really good.

Ok, this was by no means perfect, but it was pretty damn good. It had a really strong hot spicy flavour to it which many of my curries lack. Not subtle by any means, but very nice. Also, surprisingly, it wasn't nearly as hot as it might have been - certainly not mouthburningly so. It could easily afford to have another chilli or two in it. This flavour owed an awful lot to the new way of cooking onions. I'm not saying I'm a total convert by any means - it probably wouldn't work that well for some of my other dishes. It is however very nice in something like this.

What I'd change if I did it again: Firstly, the potato and egg combination was a mistake. It wasn't bad mind you, but this would work much better as a straight egg dish or a straight potato dish. Secondly, I'd use a bit less salt. The saltiness was nice but just a little too strong.

Other than that, definitely a dish well done.

Persian Rice and Lentils

2005-11-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

The cookbook I approximated this from was "Persian cooking for a healthy kitchen" by Najmieh Batmanglij (whose name I freely admit I couldn't pronounce if my life depended on it).

I'm afraid I've been rather bad with this one. I actually cooked it almost a week ago and never got around to putting it up. Thus my memory might be a bit shaky on the details.

What I used:

3 cups basmati rice
1 1/2 cups brown lentils
1 cup raisins
1 cup chopped dates
Two medium red onions
Lots of olive oil
1 tsp cardamon seeds
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp cumin seeds
Half a stock cube
Salt
1tbsp Brown sugar
Juice of one lemmon

What I did:

I started off by cooking the rice in the usual fashion.

Well... almost the usual fashion. The usual fashion doesn't involve starting to set up the rice cooker and suddenly thinking "Hmm. That tingles. Actually, you know, that's rather painful, 'cause I've JUST PLUGGED MY HAND INTO THE MAINS." This was followed by several minutes of cursing, resetting the circuit breaker and throwing away the broken rice cooker.

So, cooking it on the stove top instead. Still, business as usual - I didn't have a rice cooker . Repeatedly washed and soaked it in cold water, drained it and then brought cooked on a high heat with 5 cups of water until it was nearly dry. Then I drained off what water was left and set it aside.

While I was doing this I covered the lentils in water, added the half stock cube and cooked these until they were soft. Then I drained them and kept the cooking water.

I dry fried the cumin and cardamon, then crushed them in a mortar and pestle (which is more work than one might expect). Then I fried the onion with some salt, the sugar and plenty of olive oil. I added the crushed spices and the cinnamon. Once the onions were softening I added the raisins and dates. I continued frying them until the onions were properly cooked, then added the lentils and about 2/3 of the remaining rice and fried for a few minutes longer before taking it off the heat.

The next step of cooking involved baking the mix. I took the remaining rice and mixed it with some of the oil and cooking water from the lentils and used it to coat the inside of a deep ceramic baking dish. This was meant to form a nice crust around the main dish. I then packed the rice/lentil/everything else mix tightly down on top of it, poured on a bit more of the cooking water and the lemon juce then drizzled the top with oil.

I then baked it for about 45 minutes in a medium-hot oven. I served this with roast butternut squash and a salad.

Conclusion:

This was basically a good recipe. There were some problems though. First of all, the attempt to make the crusty outside failed completely. It's possible that if I'd cooked it on a higher temperature it would work, but really I'm not sure it's needed. Also the recipe could have used a bit more cumin and more salt. Finally, I thought the rice dominated too much over the lentils. I'd probably take out about half a cup of rice and add in another half cup of lentils. This is probably because it's originally meant to be served with meat rather than as a main dish in its own right.

The recipe called for candied orange peel, but we didn't have any to hand when I made this. If I make it again I'll definitely include it.

Overall though, definitely something to make again. The sweet flavour offset the lentils nicely, and it was a nice slightly exotic dish for not too much work, electrocution aside.

Vegetarian Mole

2005-10-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm experimenting with the chocolate and chilli combination again. This time as a main meal. I'd recommend not telling people what's in this until after they've already finished - my dad liked it, but once he realised the flavour was chocolate he found it a bit odd.

By the way, if you're wondering why I always use red onions, it's not because of any flavour preference. Our crop of red onions was good this year while our white onions failed rather dismally.

What I used:
Sunflower oil
2 medium red onions
2 red chillis
Lots of salt
1 tsp garam masala
1/3 cup cocoa
1/4 cup treacle
About 3tbsp brown sugar
2 cans of kidney beans
Boiling water.

What I did:

This is about as embarassingly simple as you'd expect. I chopped up the onions, fried them in sunflower oil with the salt for 5 minutes. I then diced the chillis and removed most of the seeds (I needn't have bothered. I keep forgetting how unspicy these chillis are) and added these to the mix. I let it cook for another 5 minutes before adding the garam masala and cocoa. (I added a little bit of water as well to keep it moist at this point).

After a few more minutes I added the beans, stirred until the beans were thoroughly coated and then added the treacle and sugar, covered everything with water and transferred it to the oven. I cooked it there for about 30 minutes.

Conclusion:

I liked it. I will agree with the assessment that it was a bit odd, but I thought it worked. That being said, it probably won't go on my list of meals to cook on a regular basis.

It could use being a bit spicier (this is a function of the chillis I used) and to have slightly less water - I didn't think the sauce was thick enough. I served it with white rice, pan fried squash and a broccoli, chickory and sesame salad.

Pseudo-African Peanut and carrot stew

2005-10-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

This was (very) loosely based off this recipe.

What I used:

Lots of sunflower oil
3 small white onions (close to shallot size)
1 medium-small red onion
4 cloves of garlic
1/2 tbsp of cumin
1/2 tbsp of brown sugar
1/2 tbsp of dried crushed chilli
3 cups of salted peanuts
8 medium-large carrots
1 can of chopped tomatoes
1 kallo yeast-free vegetable stock cube
Water

What I did:

I needed to use the food processor for the peanuts anyway, so I decided to be very lazy with this recipe and use it for all my chopping purposes. So I shoved the onions and garlic in the processor, pulsed it for a bit until they were fine and started frying them in oil as per usual. I added the sugar, cumin and chilli here.

I fried them for about 5 to 10 minutes, and while they were frying I pulsed the peanuts and the carrots in the blender (seperately). I then added the peanuts, fried for a bit longer and added the carrots as well. I continued to fry this for another 5-10 minutes, then added the tomatoes, stock and boiling water to cover it.

I simmered this for about 20 minutes before deciding it wasn't cooking fast enough. I then transferred it to the hot oven on the aga and left it for another 20 minutes. When I took it out almost all the water had evaporated, so I added a little more, stirred it and stuck it in the simmering oven to keep warm and cook slightly more. It was probably in there for 10 minutes before we ate. I served this with whole wheat African chapatis, which are like Indian chapatis except that they're from Africa. (I'll include a post on chapatis some time - I'm really struggling to get the damn things right).

Conclusion

I'd say this was a success. It wasn't perfect, but it had a nice flavour to it. Simple, but slightly unusual. I'd probably use fewer peanuts in future - maybe two instead of three cups. Possibly a touch more chilli as well.

Mombasa Pumpkin Desert

2005-10-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

Rather than given an account of this one, I'm just going to refer you to the original recipe.

The only major change I made to this was that I added some water to it. This was a mistake - the pumpkin gives off a huge amount of water on it's own, so this made the sauce way too watery.

That being said, it tasted quite nice. The pumpkin was overcooked when I did it, but that's because I was trying to reduce the overabundance of liquid. I think it could use being slightly less sweet though - I'd probably use about half a cup less sugar. Alternatively, I used about a kilo of chopped pumpkin for the amount of ingredients suggested. Using maybe half again this much would probably be advisable (but given that the sweetness was in the sauce, this probably wouldn't make it less sweet - you'd just be getting less sauce per pumpkin bit).

Butternut squash risotto

2005-10-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

This is a much more basic recipe than the others I've been playing with, but it was really nice so I'll include it anyway.

Vegetarian risotto has a danger of being a bit boring. The butternut squash in this offsets that nicely without adding a lot of work, making for a really nice easy dish. This follows a similar recipe in the reader's digest "Pumpkins and squashes" cookbook.

What I used:

A cup and a half of risotto rice
Half a butternut squash
Two small red onions
A few sprigs of fresh thyme
One kallo organic vegetable stock cube
Boiling water
Olive oil

What I did:

Pretty much what you'd expect. Diced the onions, fried them in olive oil. Peeled the squash and chopped it up into cm cubes then added it to the onions along with the thyme. After a few minutes more I added the rice, stirred for a bit longer and then cover with vegetable stock and boiling water. I let the water cook off and topped it up once or twice until the risotto and the squash were both well cooked and slightly glooy.

Conclusion:

This was actually really nice. I'm sure a lot of this was that I used a good stock for it, but the combination of the risotto flavour and the butternut squash was a definite winner. The fact that this was unbelievably easy to make was a definite point in its favour as well. I'll absolutely be making this one again. I served it with a mushroom omelette for added flavour and protein, and there were enough leftovers to have the risotto for lunch the next day as well.

David's Mole Brownies

2005-10-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: No moles or other small cute fuzzy creatures of any description were harmed in the making of this recipe. The title is pronounced "Day-vids Moh-lay Brow-nees".

This recipe is about one part "Mexican Mole Muffins" from the Green and Blacks cookbook, one part my family's traditional brownie recipe and one part pure Davidry.

What I used:

1.5 cups of flour
1 cup cocoa powder
1.5 cups soft brown sugar
1 cup boiling water
3 eggs
pinch of salt
150g 'Pure' brand sunflower based margarine
50g green and blacks dark chocolate
1tbsp powdered ginger
1tsp powdered cinnamon
1/4 tsp powdered chilli
2 fresh chillis
1 tbsp vanilla extract

What I did:

I covered the green and blacks chocolate with the boiling water to melt it and put the margarine in a pot on the stove to do similar. While the magic of thermal energy was doing its thing I sifted all the dry ingredients into the mixer bowl. Really I shouldn't have bothered doing this with the sugar - getting brown sugar through a sieve turns out to be a real pain. Then I added the wet ingredients and turned on the mixer. While this was mixing I chopped up the chillis and removed most of the seeds, then added them to the mix.

Then I greased a baking tray and used a spatula to transfer the mix from the bowl to the tray. Here I encountered my first problem: The resulting brownies were going to be wafer thin. Take 2: I transferred it to a smallish ceramic dish instead. Now it was too thick. At this point I decided "fuck it" and stuck it in the aga anyway (using a cookie tray to keep the temperature right) and baked it for about 45 minutes, turning it occasionally. I adopted the standard brownie method of considering it cooked when a knife comes out clean.

Conclusion:

Hrrm. I'll give this one a definite 'maybe'. It was reasonably nice, but all things considered I'd rather have had the normal brownies. Given some work it will probably be quite nice:

First problem, it was way too dense. I think what it needs to fix this is one more egg, less flour and no water. It may also help to cut the brown sugar with white, or replace it entirely.

Second problem, you could barely taste the spices. It needed a lot more chilli for a start: maybe one more fresh chilli and include more of the seeds, or just up the amount of dried chilli in it. You also couldn't really taste the cinnamon or ginger. I was loathe to use too much cinnamon because it can overpower recipes if you do, but it really needed a lot more than that. I think one can probably safely pile in the ginger on this.

I'll give it another try some time with fiddling, but as the recipe stands it's not really worth making again.

Fried Pasta

2005-10-06T06:20:00.000-07:00

I'm notorious for not wanting to cook pasta; It feels like cheating to me. I suspect this is a hangup from my student days and not wanting to conform to the stereotype. So I'm rather glad to try new pasta recipes which are weird enough for me to consider actually using.

This is loosely based on a recipe by Jamie Oliver from his new Italy book (Rather, the free extracts from it that were being given out in the Guardian). There are two main reasons it's only loosely based on the original recipe: Firstly, the original makes heavy use of parmesan and I don't do dairy products. Secondly, I lost the recipe halfway through cooking.

What I used:

A handful of linguini
3 eggs
Lots of olive oil
About 1 tbsp flour
Dried chilli
Dried oregano
Dried thyme
Salt
Some sun dried tomatoes which I had previously soaked and stored in a mixture of olive oil, sunflower oil and white wine vinegar.

What I did:

I cooked the linguini just short of the instructions on the packet. While this was happening I chopped up the sun dried tomatoes and then added everything else to a mixer bowl and turned on the mixer (what can I say, I'm lazy). Everything else did include quite a lot of olive oil (I was stupid and forgot that if you add flour to liquid then it goes lumpy, so I used the olive oil and some heavy duty mixing to break up the lumps and smooth it out). Once the pasta was cooked I added that to the mixer as well and mixed it for a bit longer. I then cut it up slightly with a knife (just breaking some of the pieces in half really).

I then heated more olive oil in a pan and added about a handful of the mixture to it and fried it until it was reasonably cooked, turning it over several times as it cooked. The first two didn't really get enough of the batter, so they ended up a bit crappy. The second two did and were fairly nice.

Conclusion:

I'd say this was a qualified success. The batter didn't properly coat the linguini, which is why the first two didn't work very well. It could possibly use a bit less liquid and a bit more flour next time. Jamie Oliver suggests only using the yolk from the third egg. That sounded like far too much work to me, so I didn't bother. In future I probably still won't bother, but it might be worth trying. Further, it was a bit too oily. This was my own silly fault for using so much olive oil in the batter - it didn't really need that much liquid, and a bit of water would work to substitute for most of it.

It might be worth breaking the linguini in half before cooking: The length of the noodles made it difficult to get decent sized quantities out of the bowl and into the frying pan. Other things I might try adding to the mix include chopped olives and fried onions. There are few savoury recipes that can't be made better with onions. If you do eat dairy and want to try this recipe, I'd probably recommend adding up to a handful of parmesan to the batter. I suspect it would improve it a lot.

These problems aside, it was delicious, though it did need salt and pepper added. The chilli gave it a nice bite, while the herbs combined well with the flavours of the tomatoes, egg and pasta. I probably wouldn't make this as a regular meal, but it's definitely a nice snack food.

Roast pumpkin with a spicy potato and squash filling

2005-10-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

You know when you go to see a movie which claims "Based on a novel by..." and find it has only vague similarities in common with the book? This recipe turned out sortof like that. It is based on a recipe entitled "Snake squash stuffed with spicy potatoes in a tomato-herb sauce" in "Classic Indian Vegetarian Cooking" by Julie Sahni (a book which I highly recommend). Due to a combination of laziness and available ingredients, I've significantly changed the recipe. Here's an account of my version:

First of all, hollowing out a squash sounded like an awful lot of work, so I thought I'd use a pumpkin instead. (My mother grows large quantities of squash and pumpkins and I'm living with my parents for the next few months, so I'll probably be doing a lot of pumpkin and squash experiments). Having done that I decided to add some leftover squash from the other day to the mix, as the recipe called for using the meat of the hollowed out squash in the filling. Then I changed some other things as well, just 'cause I could. This is how it went.

What I used:

One medium small pumpkin.
About 20 smallish potatoes.
Two large red onions.
Two large tomatoes.
About a third of a smallish sweet squash (I'll try to find out the type later).
Sunflower oil
One fresh chilli
Dried powdered chilli
Mustard seeds
Cumin seeds
Garam Masala
Coarse Salt
Brown Sugar
Balsamic Vinegar
Molasses

What I did:

I took the pumpkin, cut a hole in the top and scooped out the insides like I was making a Jack o' lantern. Make sure you cut a large enough hole - I didn't, and this was irritating. While this was happening I put the potatoes on to boil, cooking them until they were just slightly undercooked.

Note: I don't skin potatoes. I believe it to be a cruel and evil thing to do to an innocent vegetable. Also it's boring.

This done I started making the Massala, frying the onion (reasonably finely chopped) with a little cumin, a lot of mustard seeds about one and a half tsp of salt and a tbsp of sugar. After 5-10 minutes frying I added the powdered spices. Another 5 minutes later I added the squash and chilli, continued frying for another 5 minutes and added the potatoes. Midway through this I realised the pan I had was way too small and transferred to a bigger one. Oops.

After about 5 minutes frying the potatoes I chopped up the tomatoes and added them to the mix. Another five minutes and I added a little boiling water to prevent things from burning, a dash of balsamic vinegar and about a tablespoon of molasses. I mixed it all up, let it cook for another minute and then transferred it to the pumpkin, covering it with the 'lid' of the pumpkin.

Now to prepare the pumpkin for roasting. I coated it with oil, wrapped it in tin foil and stuck it on a baking tray. I then put it in the oven at a high temperature for about an hour and a half. The aga had lost a lot of heat though, so in a normal oven an hour would probably suffice.

To serve I openend up the foil, cut away at the top a bit to get better access to the insides (if you cut a big enough hole in the first place you won't need to do this) and scraped at the insides of the pumpkin to mix them with the filling.

I served this with pita bread and Dal.

Conclusion:

Wow. This was great. I highly recommend it. It was a lovely combination of sweet and spicy, and the pumpkin gave off a lot of juice which made the filling (which was already moist) into a really nice stew.

I'm not sure if the foil was entirely neccesary. The pumpkin gave off an awful lot of juice, and seemed to be more steamed than roasted. This produced a nice effect, but most of the moisture would probably still be there if I hadn't done it - the pumpkin was literally swimming in it at the end - and the pumpkin flesh would have acquired a nice roast flavour. It's something worth bearing in mind for future versions. Also, the potatoes could have used being cooked a little more before hand. This may have been a product of the oven losing heat.

Other things to try in future: Some sort of bean, both for flavour and for protein, would be a nice addition to the filling. Also I think sultanas would go well in it. It might need a bit more salt, but then I always think recipes could use more salt (and rarely add more salt to them because I know I'll oversalt them when eating anyway).

Random note: Every single vegetable in this dish was grown by us. Not that I can take a lot of credit for this myself, but it was still nice.

"Playing with your food" begins

2005-10-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

Hi there.

So, I make another excursion into the blogging world. Hopefully this will go a little better than my last one, which failed because it was too general (and has now been deleted).

As per the description, I'll be putting up accounts of new cooking ideas I've been playing with. This won't have any of my tried and tested recipes (those will be on my site if anywhere), just the new ones I'm playing around with.

I should have the first few recipes up later tonight after I've cooked today's dinner (which will itself be one of the first entries on here - an Indian roast squash with spicy potato filling).

David